


Tumbling Down

by micehell



Category: Velvet Goldmine
Genre: AU, Eensy bits of angst, Humor, Multi, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-10-05
Updated: 2009-10-05
Packaged: 2017-11-12 00:17:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,212
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/484518
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/micehell/pseuds/micehell
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>'Dream Pop', 'Jangle Pop', 'You're Not Fooling Anyone, That's a Sock In Your Pants Pop'... none of those were what Arthur was missing.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Tumbling Down

**Author's Note:**

> This is actually a continuation of the first part of [Two Birthdays That Never Were, and One That Was](http://archiveofourown.org/works/484516), and it might be a little confusing without having read that, but it should stand well enough on its own if you know that 1) Curt's the reporter, 2) Arthur's the rock star, and 3) they've _almost_ gotten together twice now.
> 
> Title taken from _Fall In Love With Me_ by Iggy Pop ( _How I wish, you would fall in love with me... when you're tumbling down, you just look better_ ).

They lost Nick in London, during the front end of the tour. No one really cared that much, since he'd only been a fill-in, and since he left them to pursue a career in what he insisted on calling 'dream pop'. Ray had laughed, called him a wanker, and shouted at Terry, their manager, to find them a better backup guitarist this time, one without the poncey taste in music.

Ironically, it was Ray who was the next to go. It was in South Carolina, after a night of incognito bar crawling. Ray (with about eighteen too many beers in him) decided that the band (largely ignored by the college kids surrounding them) had the most amazing sound he'd ever heard, and immediately started writing new songs on his napkin. The fact that the napkin was soaked with beer, and that the band sounded worse than Nick's fucking 'dream pop' didn't stop Ray at all, burning with the fire that only the born again and the truly drunk can come up with. But not even the cold light of day, the devastating hangover that followed, or the fact that Shauna kept insisting on calling the new sound 'jangle pop' made an impact on Ray, and so Arthur quietly told Terry to find them a new guitarist for the rest of the tour.

It was in Sydney that Arthur finally noticed the writing on the wall. Or maybe it was the message on the mirror that Shauna had written in bright pink lipstick. _I'm out of here. It's been great, but Roth promised me way better pay, plus the guarantee that I'd never have to deal with 'dream pop', or 'jangle pop', or any other kind of pop except the 'you're not fooling anyone, that's a sock in your pants' kind again. I'll miss you, even if I think the rest of the guys are dicks!_

She wasn't a musician, but good roadies, the kind that handled everything, were hard to come by, and Roth wasn't the first to try to steal her. Just the first to succeed, and Arthur spent a couple of days wondering why. She'd been with him from the beginning, even back when Pearl and Malcolm were still there, and she had to have known he'd have fought to keep her if she'd just told him.

2am in one of the gay bars down on Oxford Street, drunk enough to imagine the guy hitting on him really did look something like Curt Wild, and it came to Arthur that she hadn't asked because he _wouldn't_ fight for her. Just like he hadn't fought for Nick. Or Ray. Hell, he hadn't even heard from Ray in months, and it hadn't really left that big a hole in his life. Not like it should have.

Tokyo was where he had the final epiphany, though. Tokyo, where the fans were eager and vocal, where they were always so welcomed. Where Arthur watched and watched and watched, feeling like a spectator in his own life. Alien skin stretched around a smile that he didn't feel, a stranger's music coming from his guitar.

Young Pretenders disbanded quietly, not even Terry fighting the end when it came. Arthur wondered when he had figured it out, and why he hadn't told Arthur about it. But then he guessed money was money, and Terry was a good manager, but not exactly a saint. He'd held out as long as Arthur had, but hadn't tried to hang onto the life that Arthur had stopped living, at least once Arthur had realized it.

For a while, he was hounded by reporters, throwing questions at him that were smooth and practiced, and nothing he felt like answering. They mostly made up their own stories anyway. Arthur was going into rehab, Ray was going into rehab, Arthur was in love with Ray and couldn't live without him, Ray had made a pact with the devil and Arthur had been his sacrifice (Arthur had to admit he'd been really fond of that one, just for creativity's sake alone)... quotes from him, quotes from Ray, quotes from Shauna, quotes from fucking Nick and his new band, and nothing of it true. Arthur found he didn't really care, the rock star's life he'd fallen into by accident nothing he minded losing in the end.

It wasn't until the press died down, with back sales starting to slip, Young Pretenders already fading into obscurity in a world devoted to the latest fad, that Arthur started to wonder what he should do now that he wasn't a rock star anymore.

He tried London again, then Paris. He tried Cairo, Athens, Kathmandu, Singapore, Honolulu, Portland, Des Moines, Gary, San Antonio, Kissimmee, and Montreal. But none of them had the answer to the question he wanted to ask.

The news room at _The Herald_ was fairly modern, nothing like Arthur's imagination had painted it. Of course, Arthur's idea of a news room basically came from watching _His Girl Friday_ , which, admittedly, might have been not quite the best source to form one from, but he was still a little surprised by how open it was. Open enough that he could see Curt clearly, bent over his desk, wearing jeans and a t-shirt even amidst all the office clothes around him, and looking like the opening sequence to the type of cheesy porn Arthur rarely admitted to watching.

Seeing him, Arthur's resolve almost failed. He felt like a little boy telling his first crush that he liked him. And, okay, never mind that Curt actually had been his first crush, not to mention first sex, Arthur still felt that he should feel cooler than this in some way. More suave. Cary Grant, even if he'd decided to forget about the whole _His Girl Friday_ thing.

But Arthur had just spent the last year and a half pretending that seeing Curt again at his birthday party hadn't been the most important thing that had happened to him in years. Had spent too much time pretending that he still wanted to be a rock star when he'd never really wanted to be one at all. Had spent the last half year avoiding New York even though it was here that he'd made his wish at that very same birthday party, and here that he had to be to make that wish come true.

Arthur had only met Curt twice, but he still knew that the look of surprise on his face was something rare. Curt had always seemed familiar to Arthur, even though logic said he couldn't be, like a puzzle you knew the final picture on even though you hadn't quite worked out how the pieces fit yet.

Whatever Arthur knew about Curt, though, wasn't enough to explain why Curt smiled, fucking glowing with it, and then all of a sudden shouted, "Lou, you owe me five bucks!"

A man seated at a large desk at the front of the room looked up at that, raised one eyebrow at the sight of Arthur standing there, then snorted. "Damn, Curt, what did you do? Send him a fan letter to get him here?"

Curt was still smiling, still glowing, still looking right at Arthur. "No. I just made a wish."

/story

**Author's Note:**

> A/N part 2: Okay, the footnotes are about stupid things I put into the story, just in case anyone wants to play along.  
> 1\. The 'dream pop' thing being in London and having something to do with a guitarist named Nick is a joke about The Dream Academy. Does anyone else remember them? I liked _Life in a Northern Town_ the first couple of times I heard it, but then it just kept playing and playing, and, yes, playing, so now I really have it in for the guys, et voila. ;)  
>  2\. The South Carolina band that leads Ray to 'jangle pop' is, of course, Hootie and the Blowfish. I'm with the rest of the band on how they sounded, but Ray was a convert. *snork*  
> 3\. Roth and the sock reference should be a given, but jic, it's referencing David Lee and his sad attempt to make us believe he was anything but hot air, oi.  
> 4\. There really are a lot of gay bars down around Oxford Street in Sydney. I don't know if that was true around about 1985, but, hey, it could be correct.  
> 5\. Young Pretenders got their name from Arthur, since he's a Stuart, and... well, yeah, I'm sure you can take it from there. ;)  
> 6\. Most of the cities mentioned were famous for people either going there to seek fame or answers or a really good time, but Des Moines and Gary were thrown in for the irony, Kissimmee was thrown in just because I love to hear tourists mispronounce it, and Montreal was for Rose. ;)  
> 7\. When Curt is bent over his desk in his jeans, I'm imagining his ass sticking up a little, maybe swinging from side to side a bit, like a red flag to a bull. In the porn version, someone would tell him they had a really big, er, _story_ for him, then fuck him across the desk... *cries* I should have just written the porn version. :P


End file.
